Family Sent Their Effeminate Son To 'Sissy Boy' Therapy Sessions — Is This OK?

Years later the boy, aged 38, committed suicide and now his siblings blame the child therapy for the untimely death of their brother.

When he was only five-years-old, Kirk Murphy‘s parents sent him to a government-funded experiment at UCLA, where he underwent therapy sessions to help “rid him” of his effeminate behavior with an anti-gay professor, Dr. George Rekers. Now after agonizing over his suicide, his family believes this so-called “sissy boy” experiment directly contributed to his death.

Kirk’s younger sister Maris explains to CNNof the treatment, “It left Kirk just totally stricken with the belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else. He even ate his lunch in the boy’s bathroom for three years of his high school career, if you want to call it that.”

His mother, Kaytee admits she started to worry about five-year-old Kirk after she realized he possessed some female traits and would prefer to play with dolls over trucks.

“It just bothered me that maybe he was picking up maybe too many feminine traits,” she explains.”That’s when she decided to enroll him in the government-funded program with Dr. Reker. Well, him being the expert, I thought, maybe I should take Kirk in. In other words, nip it in the bud, before it got started any further.”

The sessions are documented in a series of research papers which refer to Kirk as a boy named ‘Kraig.’

But this therapy was anything but helpful to Kirk, who had no idea that he was “different.” At the sessions, Kirk would be placed in a room, behind a one way mirror, where he would have to decide between girl toys and clothes or boys items. If he went to the “masculine side” of the room, he would be complimented by his mom, if he went to the “feminine side,” he would be ignored.

And this sort of practice was also done at home. Kirk was given blue poker chips for his masculine behavior and red ones for his feminine behavior. If he had more blue chips than red, he was given a treat. If he had more red than blue, he was chastised with “physical punishment by spanking from his father.”

Once, Kaytee said her husband hit Kirk “so hard that he had welts up and down his back and on his buttocks.”

His brother Mark and sister Maris say this treatment left Kirk very troubled, even throughout high school, and they believe it led him to take his own life at the age of 38.

“The research has a postscript that needs to be added,” Maris says. “That is that Kirk Andrew Murphy was Kraig and he was gay, and he committed suicide.”

NOTE: Tune in tonight at 10 ET on CNN TV, as “AC360º” examines the shocking “experimental therapy” designed to make feminine boys more masculine. See what the Murphys have to say about the devastating result in a special report, “The Sissy Boy Experiment.”